Samsung joins HEVC Advance to license out and in H.265 tech

Ultra high-definition video content is still far from peaking, but in our coverage of the codec tug-o-war between HEVC and VP9, there seems to be a huge breakthrough for the Motion Picture Editors Guild— the group behind the High Efficiency Video Codec or H.265.

HEVC Advance, which handles licensing specific for the codec, has announced that Samsung has become an associate licensor and licensee of H.265. This allows the company to not only use H.265 compression in its products, but also develop upon it and patent innovations based on it.

Having one of the big television and smartphone manufacturers behind a what’s really a Hollywood-made standard is a vital get in the arsenal of MPEG. Google doesn’t look to be letting go of its open-source VP9 codec soon, though, as it remains the choice medium for videos uploaded to its properties including Google Photos and YouTube.

The Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ do appear to have H.265 playback capabilities, but we’ve yet to confirm their 4K video recording format.

Jules Wang is News Editor for Pocketnow and one of the hosts of the Pocketnow Weekly Podcast. He came onto the team in 2014 as an intern editing and producing videos and the podcast while he was studying journalism at Emerson College. He graduated the year after and entered into his current position at Pocketnow, full-time.